UAV-Employed Intelligent Approach to Identify Injured Soldier on Blockchain-Integrated Internet of Battlefield Things

Abstract

This study proposes an intelligent approach to identifying an injured soldier on blockchain-integrated Internet-of-Battlefield Things (IoBT) employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The intelligent approach combines a unique deep learning (DL) model with a smartwatch-based heart-rate (HR) data collection technique. Different activation functions (i.e., MISH and Leaky rectified linear unit) are used in the proposed DL model to enhance the identification task by extracting the in-depth features from the images. Furthermore, a smart-watch-based HR data analyzing technique is introduced to confirm the injury of a soldier. However, due to the UAV’s low battery capacity, the identification task is offloaded to the neighboring edge computing server to improve system performance. Moreover, to restrict the access of registered IoT devices (e.g., UAV, smartwatch, etc.) and protect the sensitive data leakage on IoBT, a blockchain-integrated access control (ACL) mechanism is utilized. Detailed experimental results are provided for the proposed DL model that outperforms existing DL models. Besides, implementing a smartwatch-based HR data analysis technique for the soldiers improves the outcome of the proposed DL model. To provide a fine-grained data protection mechanism in the proposed system, a private blockchain-based ACL management policy is constructed utilizing hyperledger, and various assessment metrics have been scrutinized.